i hate to be so harsh, genuinely, but i'm not sure i can imagine how 11 people in 30 days worked on this. nothing is labeled or described in game, there are no indicators for anything besides health, i'm not sure what the thing i collected is (and i had to look at the game page to even figure out how to pick it up). i tried pressing every button and combination of buttons after collecting it to no avail. i was only able to see 4 screens but i'm pretty certain there are more behind areas that i can't access either due to no information being given to the player or because the thing i got was bugged. i'm being harsh here because i imagine i am being less harsh than how other people might be. i'd recommend scaling down and perhaps working with 2d next time. i hope ya'll keep at it, it takes a lot of work to create something even remotely playable but the biggest thing that separates people that do this stuff versus the ones that don't are how you respond to frustration and hard feedback, and if ya'll can continue on from this i'm sure you can come into your own. very good luck to you!
Play game
Malignant Abberation's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Metroidvania | #91 | 1.000 | 1.500 |
| Overall | #94 | 0.750 | 1.125 |
| Sensory | #95 | 0.667 | 1.000 |
| Execution | #95 | 0.667 | 1.000 |
| Enjoyment | #95 | 0.667 | 1.000 |
Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Engine
Unity
Team/Developer
Rama Chris Bit, Alex Benton, Samuel Ortega, Igor Ferraz, Adis Tabakovic, Jesse Conel, Jea Lee, Victor Dong, Yama, Bahati, Justin Reyes
External assets
SFX provided for free by Pixabay
Comments
It's all good man. I genuinely appreciate the honest feedback. I'd obviously have liked it to be in a much better state than it is right now. It was a lot of mismanagement on my end and I take full responsibility for that. I'd overestimated the amount of work the game was going to take and underestimated some of the output of my collaborators which led to things being pushed back a lot. It's mostly my fault though since a lot of executive decisions should have been made way earlier during the jam and I ended up taking my sweet-ass-time with the level design, which led to uncertainty in the team and clogged the pipeline.
There are QOL improvements I'd like to implement by the next patch like better indicators for scene transitions, tutorial pop ups, and just changing some of the controls in general, but I definitely hear you. We're interested on working on the game some more. I'd love to implement the animations our animators worked on and the game properly art-ed.
that's great to hear! i'm a solo dev myself but based on design docs i've seen from the big folks like id, they do a ton of meticulous planning and speaking from experience it helped me sooo much. and the things i didn't plan ended up getting either sidelined or poorly implemented. i'm glad ya'll are keeping at it, i hope it ends up coming together.
Hey, do you happen to use any free planning/organizing sites like Trello or Miro? Our dev team found a lot of use in just having a digital "board" with all of our ideas collected together so we could - for example - decide on keeping the most integral parts of our game and throwing away any of the other things that seemed too far-fetched or unneeded for our time, skill and manpower limitations.
You can use Trello to make lists like "to do", "in progress", "done" etc. that you can then fill with cards for stuff like textures, code and sound effects with all kinds of options for checklists and jobs for different members. Miro is a whiteboard-like service which lets you draw, paste images and generally visualize any of your ideas on a community whiteboard that everyone can view in real time, so you can easily share your vision with the entire team at once. Both were absolutely integral to our process, Trello especially, and I very much doubt we would've ever managed to submit a game in playable form - if at all - if we didn't have at least some kind of organization and way to track how much of our objectives were in the "done" pile by the end of a certain week of work.
But to be fair, it is absolutely important to note that you guys had a much bigger dev team and scope in general, while we only had two developers and a composer, so I absolutely do not want to make any false comparisons here. On the other hand, that might be even more reason to invest in sites like the ones pictured above, so you can be more certain of everyone being on the same page as well as having their priorities in check as well as ready on time.
I absolutely don't want to seem like I'm talking down, though. Our project was still quite rushed at the end and definitely wasn't the perfect final result we were hoping for, but I feel like the one thing that we did do really well as a team was this synergy in planning, although again, it's much easier said and done when you basically only have 2-3 people planning the game. But whatever the case, even if unfinished, visually your game looks absolutely amazing in many aspects and has immense potential in others. I would very much be interested in seeing the final result, if you ever come around to make it! Hope this helped! :)
It's a .rar file, it's similar to a .zip folder. You'll need to use something like 7zip or WinRar to extract it and then you can open the exe file.
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